Monthly Archives: October 2016

This time around, we jump down the rabbit hole with Flip Flappers, discuss the hidden meaning of the cats’ dialogue in March Comes in Like a Lion, and ponder the proper diet for a modern Keijo player. Additionally, is Girlish Number annoying, or is it just so brilliant in its recreation of workplace incompetence that it’s just painful for anyone who has ever held a job to watch? These questions, and more, answered* on this week’s** episode!

*To be perfectly candid, we don’t really answer these questions. But they are posed, and that should count for something, right?

**Our podcast timing has gotten weird and I have no idea if saying “this week’s episode” makes any sense, but whatever, I’m not getting into “fortnight” or what have you.

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This week, we survey the full range of fanservice available this season by examining both Yuri!!! on Ice and Keijo!!!!!!!!, which have, between them, 11 exclamation points. I think between this overabundance of exclamation points and the unnecessary semicolons that the Occultic;Nine people love using, we may need to implement some kind of punctuation tax; this is getting ridiculous. Oh crap I just used an unnecessary semicolon, now I’m part of the problem ><.

In other news: Hamburgers, a bi-coastal survey, and Magical Girl Raising Project turns LB into this:

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If I have any reputation at all in the anime blogosphere (which is optimistic), it’s for being critical of feminist criticism when applied to anime. So, when a site crops up that’s all about applying feminist criticism to anime, you might think I would be against it on principle, but that’s not true; in fact, it’s the opposite.

I don’t plan to support AnimeFeminist on Patreon, but I don’t have a problem with what they’re doing. A site by feminists, for feminists? Sure; that’s not my jam, but so what?

So why talk about it at all, when it has nothing to do with me? Mostly just because I see anime fans demonizing the site right from the getgo, which– in addition to coming off as just mean-spirited–implies that they don’t understand what the most dangerous problem is with current anime criticism. The problem is not the fact that feminist criticism, as one particular lens through which to examine media, exists; it’s when it’s treated as the default for ALL criticism, and anyone who doesn’t agree with its usage is in serious danger of being branded a misogynist.

Let’s look at AniFem: it’s clearly by feminists, for feminists. It wears what it’s doing 100% on it’s sleeve. There is the whole Patreon angle, but the only people who are going to contribute are people who genuinely want to read this kind of criticism; no one else is forced to pay one red cent. If you don’t find value in feminist criticism, you can simply not visit the site and it will never effect your life.*

Now let’s look at other sites, like Anime News Network and other sites that want to be Anime News Network. These sites use terms like “toxic masculinity,” “male gaze” as though they’re completely accepted mainstream terms, with no indication that these terms are associated with a certain ideology. Typically, fans who ask inconvenient questions like “Is masculinity really toxic?” and “Why are you using the original form of gaze theory, and ignoring how the concept has evolved?” are ignored at best, branded misogynists at worst. There’s a generally unspoken rule (although some people take care to make it explicit) that if you have any issue with the terms of academic feminism being engaged in pop culture criticism, it’s because you’re an anti-feminist, a.k.a. misogynist.

Perhaps worse, in this environment, anime criticism that doesn’t use feminist theory is seen as not doing its due diligence; it’s basically taken as an article of faith that a review MUST come from a feminist perspective, or else it’s lacking in intellectual rigor.

Now let’s compare ANN and to AniFem. If ANN were say, Anime Feminist News Network, it would be one thing, but it’s not: it is THE anime news network. You can ignore it if you want, but then you’re kind of shooting yourself in the foot; ANN provides a valuable service in terms of providing otaku news from Japan for English- language fans, and you’ll have a hard time keeping current on anime (and several related fandoms) if you refuse to use either ANN, or sites that source at least partially from ANN. Basically, it’s a hotbed of feminist criticism that you literally cannot avoid if you want to participate in the fandom.

Everybody is allowed to do whatever kind of criticism they want; if a bunch of Marxist fans want to set up a site to review anime from a Marxist perspective, they’re welcome to do that; wild horses couldn’t drag me over to read it, but that’s beside the point. If mecha fans want to build a site that critiques anime solely based on the inventiveness of a show’s mechanical design,** they’re welcome to do that. Many people feel burned out by feminism because of the feeling that they can’t escape from it on major outlets; that doesn’t mean that feminists don’t have the same right as absolutely everyone else to make sites, with their own labor, that cater to their own interests.

TLDR: Even if you have no interest in patronizing AniFem, and even if you blatantly disagree with the show’s approach to criticism, for me it’s still part of the solution, not the problem, because engaging with feminist theory via the site is 100% a choice.

I think the anger of the fandom should be directed at those situations where we don’t really have a choice.

*Of course, you might see references or links to it in your Twitter timeline, but if you’re such a special snowflake you can’t even handle THAT level of engagement with views you disagree with, then you’re just being a hypocrite. After all, one of the best arguments in favor of letting all kinds of shows exist, no matter how ‘offensive’, is that if you don’t like it, you don’t have to watch it; similarly, if you don’t like an anime criticism website, you don’t have to visit it.

**I’d kind of like to see more stuff like this, although I can’t guarantee it doesn’t already exist and I’m just ignorant of it– for better or for worse, I spend more time watching anime these days then keeping track of anime fan projects online. I’m sure I miss stuff.

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Otakusphere Weekly is back for fall, the perfect accessory for your SuperCool Autumn Otaku Life. This week, we take on the beginning of the fall season’s offerings including Magical Girl Raising Project, Izetta:The Last Witch, Magic-Kyun Renaissance, Uta no Prince-Sama Maji Love Sparkle Sparkle Legend Star Sparkle Sparkle Whatever, Scorching Ping Pong Girls, and many more. We also discuss which shows from last season we watched until the bitter end, the dangers of scuba diving, and the fact that my neighborhood is lacking a Denny’s.

Why can’t I have a Denny’s? Is that really so much to ask?Sometimes you just wake up and want a Grand Slam Breakfast, know what I’m saying?

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Back in the summer, when we put the podcast on hiatus, we had two episodes recorded that never got edited and posted. Now, stopping the podcast with no warning and leaving finished episodes in limbo is obviously not a good way to do things and not how I like to operate, but to paraphrase the wise Kero-chan:

Obviously this is from a while ago so we’re still discussing summer shows like Sweetness and Lightning and Amanchu! and stuff, but probably worth a listen if you’ve enjoyed the show thus far. Episode 17 is still being edited, but I’ll update this post with it as soon as it’s done.

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I was a bad girl and didn’t keep up with blogging Food Wars! episodically for most of the season. Part of this was because I discovered Chef’s Table on Netflix, and I was so enraptured by the most pretentious cooking documentary I had ever seen that my quota of food television was temporarily filled. I mean, how can poor Soma hope to compete with chefs who say things like “I won’t let my plating canvas be limited by the profit motive of plate manufacturers?” How can he compete with people who think that they are CHANGING THE WORLD with their approach to root vegetables? It’s just not fair.

However, since I did finish watching the cour, I felt I may as well do a bit of wrapping up here. On the whole, I enjoyed The Second Plate, but it had a few problems:

The Stagiaire arc was much more interesting than the Autumn Elections, so it was a shame that it took up only a third of the screen time. It featured the show starting to veer away from the shonen battle format, and as someone who hasn’t read the manga, that was a pleasant surprise to me.

I’m not sure I’m satisfied with how Soma finally experiencing a decisive loss played out. Sure, just about every protagonist in a shonen story loses eventually (so they can reassess their strategy and come back even stronger, then win a million more times), but something about it just felt…off. They made such a big deal about Soma promising his Dad that he would never lose to anyone else before he could beat him, I felt like he should have apologized to his Dad or something after he lost to Hayama. Not because any sane person should feel the need to do that, but because it would have felt thematically appropriate for the show. I don’t know, I can’t quite put my finger on it, but something was missing there.

Of course, there were good things too. Erina has gone from a stone-cold bitch to a stone-cold bitch who likes shoujo manga; Megumi is gaining more and more confidence, even without Soma there to back her up; Soma has learned some humility, and even more importantly, realized that his family’s diner was never just a diner; The judges occasionally refrained from using the word “umami” 47 times when critiquing any one dish.

I don’t have much else to comment on though. I think Food Wars! is going to take its place next to UtaPri as one of those shows I always watch and enjoy, but don’t expect anything new and different from. That’s probably a weird thing to say, since I just pointed out that the Stagiaire arc was an example of the show branching out, but my gut tells me that was an anomaly; manga readers, feel free to butt in and tell me I’m wrong. I just feel like, for whatever reason, at one point I was really invested in the whole idea of shonen battles being fought with cooking instead of violence (not that that in and of itself is an new concept, but it is still somewhat unusual), and now I’m just kind of over it. I still like the show, but if they never made a new season ever again, I’d be okay with it.

Now I feel like I’m ending my coverage of the show with a downer, which is a shame because it really was an enjoyable season that I don’t regret watching in the slightest. I think I’m realizing I can be surprisingly fickle in terms of what concepts I’m into, though.

July: “OMG they’re fighting with burgers instead of their fists, that is so fun and neat and novel and I get to use lots of food porn vocabulary if I write about it!”